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Pronouncing Ancient Greek: Food for Classics Students' Thought

How did pre-modern Greeks speak?

More importantly, what is the modern learner of pre-modern Greek to do about it?

And
which version of Greek, while we're at it? Greek was, as indeed it is,
like any other language in having regional and chronological variation.
The the development of one sound in different versions of Greek will
illustrate this. What we normally represent with the Greek letter θ
(known these days by its Byzantine name of "theta") was pronounced as a
voiceless aspirate [tʰ] (like the "t" of English "top") in the Attic
dialect of Athens during the fifth century B.C. In the Doric dialect of
Sparta in the same period, however, it was a fricative [θ] (the "th" of
English "thug") as in Modern Greek, having changed from [tʰ] some time
in the preceding century. It was the [tʰ] version that made it into the
Koine, the roughly standard version of the language that developed all
over the eastern mediterranean at the end of the 4th century B.C.. By
the 4th century A.D, though, that intrepid sound had become a
fricative [θ], just like its Spartan counterpart had a thousand years
earlier. In the meantime that selfsame Spartan dialect, which survived
in what is today Tsakonia, had transformed its own erstwhile [θ] into a
plain old [s], which it still is in modern Tsakonian words of original
Doric vintage.

Similar issues obtain for other
sounds. Limiting ourselves diachronically to the middle of the 5th
century, a cross-dialect synchronic comparison of the evidence
shows that Ionic, Cretan and Lesbian dialects no longer had their /h/
whereas Attic and some other dialects still preserved it. Doric had an
additional /h/ in positions where everybody else has /s/ (rather like
many modern Spanish dialects today.) Attic lost its /w/ sound when most
other dialects still had it and developed a high front rounded /y/ (i.e.
the u of French "lune" [lyn] or the ü of German "über" ['yːbɐ]) where most dialects had /u/. Attic's own /u/ sound, on the
other hand, corresponds to the /oː/ of most other dialects (the "ô" of
French "drôle" [dʁoːl]) Arcadian, unlike the rest, had what was probably
a /tʃ/ (like the "tch" of English "match" [mætʃ]) complete with a
special letter to represent it. This by no means exhausts the
differences, which go beyond articulatory minutia to issues of
morphology, lexicon and even prosody. Thessalian, for example, was
probably stress-accented and stress-timed in contrast to the rest of the
Hellenosphere which at the time had moraic timing and a pitch-accent.

Given
that the surviving texts written in something we call "Ancient Greek"
come from a great many regions and were produced over the course of
about a millennium, one cannot countenance an attempt at complete
historical accuracy as a practical matter. Otherwise one will have to
adopt different pronunciations and even wildly different prosodic
systems for different periods, and even different authors of the same
period. Even leaving aside the uncertainties in the relative chronology
of sound changes and prosodic developments, it hardly makes sense for
learners to be forced to use one pronunciation for Homer, another for
Sappho and Alcaeus, another for Aeschylus, another for Demosthenes,
another for Menander and so on.

The Classical Attic Option

For
reading classical texts, many often recommend using the pronunciation
of late 5th century B.C. Athens, since it is the best attested
"classical" pronunciation and since Attic became the literary standard.
The idea is that, though one may not be able to read Homer and Sappho
like an 8th century Ionian or a 7th century Lesbian, one can at least
read them with the pronunciation that, say, Plato would have given them.
This is a sound solution for those who wish to limit themselves to
pre-hellenistic Greek and who, as we'll see, don't mind implicitly
making a few assumptions about Athenian sociolinguistics.

Below
are some audio-examples (courtesy of yours truly) in conservative
formal 5th century Athenian (with pitch accent, durational prosody, the
works) as it is envisioned by modern historical linguists (the
phonological reconstruction mostly follows Geoff Horrocks and W.S. Allen
give or take a vowel. For data used to reconstruct the realization of
pitch-accent and durational rhythm see Allen's "Accent and Rhythm" and
A.M. Devine and L. Stephens "Prosody of Greek Speech")

Exciting,
and perhaps convincing, though it may be to be able to read things out
loud with this "accent", there are a few problems with adopting it as a
general way of reading Ancient Greek beyond its classical period, to say
nothing of teaching it for any period to non-specialists.

First,
there's the problem of anachronism. Quite a few important texts were
produced centuries after the Athenian Golden Age, and reading e.g. a
dialogue in Menander with the pronunciation of 200 years previous hardly
makes any sense.

There's also the fact that the
phonology and especially the prosody of this system are, while
definitely the most probable layout for a given period, somewhat
typologically rare and therefore both unstable and difficult to learn.
The vowels fully contrast for height, backness, length and roundedness
in some rather funky ways. For example there's a four-way contrast on
the front axis between ε, η, ει and ῃ / e ~ εː ~ eː ~ ε(ː)i/. The symbol
/ː/ means that the sound is lengthened. /εː/ is like the "aî" of French
"maître" and /eː/ resembles the last vowel of French "parlé". This
corresponds to a two-way contrast on the back axis /o ~ ɔː/. Moreover,
since one does not know precisely when the vowel of ω was raised, one is
just as justified in pronouncing it as either /ɔː/ or /oː/ (the former
is like the vowel of French "fort".) The obvious instability of such a
system means that it was probably only around for a short while before
subsequent chain-shifts rejiggered the vowel system once again, thereby
making it an exceedingly narrow window into the past.

Likewise
the combination of pitch-accent with durational prominence -a feature
which there's no getting around- will take some getting used to. It is
sometimes said, even by some who should know better, that Attic Greek
was like modern Norwegian in that it had an accent
system of stress+pitch with a lexical component in the alignment of
accentual peaks. This seems quite unlikely in the face of the actual
evidence (whose details need not detain us now) without some
qualification. The likely reality is somewhat more "exotic" (from the
perspective of a modern Euroglot, anyway.) Though accoustically
reminiscent of French in some ways, the actual prosody of 5th century
Athenian speech (and that of much of the rest of the ancient
Hellenosphere) was more akin to the rhythmic and pitch patterns of Tokyo
Japanese and, even more so, to certain lesser-known languages such as
Nubi, Isthmus Zapotec and some southern Bantu languages where lexical
tone and durational prominence coexist, as they did in Greek, in
some fairly interesting ways. No European language works in this latter
fashion, nor does any language a classics student is likely to have
previously studied.

For me, personally, it was of
some difficulty to acquire and put into practice (and that only once I
had finally extracted the information in learnable form from the
mountains of data and papers and specialized books.)

Less
obviously, but perhaps more crucially, the issue is also one of
synchronic variation within a single dialect. Note the following from
Plato's Cratylus (translation mine)

Socrates:
You know that our ancestors used the sounds ῑ
and δ well- especially women, who are most conservative of older
pronunciations. But these days people change ῑ to ει or η , and δ to ζ,
hoping to increase the grandeur and sublimity of the sounds.
Hermogenes: What do you mean?
Socrates: Well, for example, in ancient times the word for day was ἱμέρα
/hi:méra/, whereas others said ἑιμέρα /he:méra/, but now we say
ἡμέρα /hεːméra/.
.........
Socrates: And you know the ancients pronounced ζυγόν /zdyːgón/ as δυογόν /dyogón/, right?
Hermogenes: That's right, they did.

Plato,
obviously, was no great historical linguist. That said, what his
ruminating puppets are describing is in fact likely not archaism, but
rather innovation among Athenian women which had its origins in
non-standard speech and, depending on the analysis adopted, was either
later generalized into ubiquity or leveled into oblivion in later
developments of the Athenian dialect.

By the latter
analysis (the one I prefer), the two sound-changes here described /εː/
-> /eː/ and /zd -> (d)d/ were to be found outside of Athens. The
presence of /dd/ (word-initial /d/) where Attic had /zd/ (both
descending from an original /dz/ rather than the /d(y?)/ Plato
postulates) is known to have been a feature of many of the ancient
dialects in the immediate vicinity of Plato's stomping ground. For
example, the Gortyn law-code from the mid-5th century B.C. shows Cretan
καταδικαδδετο /katadikadːétːoː/ "let him condemn" as against early Attic
κατδικαζέτω /katadikazdétɔː/. This was also true of the Beotian dialect
of Thebes, spoken not too far from Athens, which also had /e:/ where
Attic had /ɛ:/ (e.g. Theban χρειματα /kʰré:mata/ "money, property,
capital" as against Athenian χρήματα /kʰrɛ́ːmata/.) In other words,
Theban Greek shows possibly two features which Plato seems to perceive
in the speech of the (presumably Athenian) women he had contact with.
Though the consonant-shift is not a feature of later Attic, and we have
no evidence for Beotian influence on standard Attic in this period,
neither of these tell us much about non-standard (non-male?) speech of
the time and place in question. It should be noted that since early
antiquity, diverse circumstances of human and commercial mobility had
acclimatized all manner of Greek dialects in Athens, as stated by Solon
(24, 31.f) and Pseudo-Xenophon (II 8).

The second way
to interpret the evidence is to conclude that the vowel shift is not
/ɛ:/ -> /e:/, but rather /ɛ:/ -> /i:/ and, like the
consonant-shift, is a purely independent innovation which presages later
vowel-shifts known to have taken place in the Athenian vernacular more
generally in subsequent centuries. In this analysis, the original /zd/
is not turned into /d/ but has been metathesized in women's speech into
/dz/ and is on the way toward becoming /z/ as it did in all of Attic by
the mid 3rd century at the latest.

Either possibility
suffices for our purposes. While the depiction of female behavior as a
continuation of a tradition rather than (as one would expect) a mere
perversion of, and deviation from, the male norm may be interesting for
the classical historian, what I want to draw attention to is that Plato
has furnished evidence that the speech of women, back there and back
then, differed phonologically from that of men enough for attentive speakers like Plato to notice and ponder the difference.

This is
not as far-fetched as it may seem to those familiar only with the urban
and standard versions of modern western European languages. In many
language-communities around the world, men and women have different
pronunciation habits no less than people of different socioeconomic
status.

For example, working-class male
speakers of Jordanian Arabic in some urban regions often have [g] for classical Arabic /q/ where their female
counterparts have [ʔ] (a glottal stop, pronounced like the articulatory
break represented by the dash in "uh-oh"), such that قلقان qalqān "nervous" is
pronounced [gəlgaːn] or as [ʔǝlʔaːn] depending on gender. The [g] sound
is in general construed as "manly" among the working class and [ʔ] the opposite. Thus, for example, [g] is the only
socially-acceptable pronunciation in such contexts as army life or among
law enforcement personnel, with the male use of [ʔ] somewhat
stigmatized in such circles. On the other hand, among more affluent
Jordanians some studies have found [ʔ] to be the dominant realization for both men
and women, with [g] demeaned as unrefined, coarse or low-class. In this
particular case, we have good evidence showing that the [g] version is a
borrowing from neighboring rural and Bedouin dialects which later
entered urban speech and entered into competition with the native [ʔ]
along gender and social lines.

It is in fact not uncommon for a language's pronunciation to be sensitive to gender, religious affiliation,
age-group, social class, political inclination, tribal identity, professional vs. domestic settings or any combination
thereof. In the Arabic dialect of Nazareth, Muslim women are more likely than Christian women to use [k] instead of [ʔ] for /q/. Among Tunisian Muslims the pronunciations of young men and young women resemble one another more than either of them do the speech of women over 40 who in turn display marked differences from men over 40, but Tunisian Jews display different patterns from this entirely. In some communities use of features typically associated with one's opposite gender can also be sensitive to whether one is talking about themselves as the main focus or another person or a particular event, whether they feel positively or negatively about what they're describing etc.

I mention this because
it is a handy example of how sociological phenomena and linguistic habits can interact in some fairly complicated, circumstance-specific
ways. You'll notice that above I described the recordings not as a
demonstration of the pronunciation of 5th century Attic, but as a
"conservative, formal" register thereof. It seems clear, at the very
least, that
conservative and progressive pronunciations coexisted even within the
same city in the classical period (as Sven-Tage Teodorsson showed in his
detailed study of Attic and Koine phonology- even if the precise nature
of those pronunciations is off by a century or three.) If the trends
associated with high vs. low speech registers in modern languages are
any indication, pronunciation would also have varied by context within a
single speaker's idiolect. By another analogy with colloquial Arabic,
it may have made a difference in phonology, probably a somewhat
significant one, whether an educated 5th century
Athenian was speaking on stage or in a brothel. Moreover, if Plato's
evidence means what it appears to, modern reconstructions of 5th century
Attic may only represent the speech of privileged males, and then
perhaps only in the most formal of contexts!

One of the
most pervasive problems of historical linguistics, and historical
dialectology in particular, is the researchers' neglect of the fact that
the languages they study were once spoken by real frickin' people, and
no group of real people is linguistically homogenous.

Taking
the authenticity argument to its logical extreme, even if we had better
information about how male and female speech differed in 5th century
Attic, would anyone seriously then contemplate having female classics
students be taught a different pronunciation from males, all for
authenticity's sake?

Of course, authenticity isn't always worth a soldier's damn for the modern student. But even if it were, the version of Greek speech you
hear in my recordings, then, the one typically imagined to be that of
5th century Athens, is at best just that: a version. Heavily reliant as
it is upon privileged male grammarians who had both a vested interest in
presenting affluence and maleness as normative and femaleness/poverty a
regrettable deviance, it likely only tells one side of a very complex
story.

In a sense, then, using a reconstruction of
acrolectic 5th century Athenian speech is counterproductive. By putting
the learner in the odd position of having to pretend to be an ancient
Athenian, with hopelessly incomplete sociolinguistic knowledge, it
merely reminds us of the futility of pretending to be what you're not.
Learners of Greek, I feel, need something that it's possible to mispronounce
and appropriate while maintaining access to a voice of the ancient
world when reading ancient texts out loud, a version of Greek hospitable
to foreign adoption, which would not be hopelessly "put on" in
historical context and which retrospectively encompasses the great
Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and the unjustly neglected
Apollonius of Rhodes. (I'm assuming for the purposes of this writing that historical pronunciations matter when it comes to appreciating ancient literature. I have some reservations about that myself but this isn't the place to air them. I'll do that later.)

The best candidate I can see is a
streamlined version of middle Hellenistic Koine, by which I mean the
rough supraregional norm of the late 3rd century B.C. See below for more
details

Below
is a description of how these sounds correspond to the graphemes used
today to represent ancient Greek, along with example words and a
recording thereof. The examples are taken from Athenian and Hellenistic
comedy, classical epigrams, ancient
graffiti and the writings of a few bloviating moralizers. To show a
different side of Ancient Greek, I have taken care to include lexical
items and semantic ranges which the beginning or intermediate student is
unlikely to learn from a Classics teacher.

ε - /e/ as in πέος /péos/ "cock, schlong"
ευ
- /ew/, /ewː/ before a vowel as in ἐκμοχλεύω /ekmokʰléwːoː/ "to fuck
the shit out of" (literally "to wedge open with a lever")
ει - /eː ~ eːj/ before a vowel as in κιναιδεία /kinaidéːa/ "lust for young boys"; /i:/ in all other environments as in λείχοντες /líːkʰontes/ "lickers, men who eat pussy, muff-munchers"

ζ - /z/ at the beginning of a word; doubled as /zː/ in the middle of a word as in κασαλβάζω /kasalbázːoː/ "to whore out"

η- /eː/ as in σποδησιλαύρα /spodeːsiláwra/ "street-walker"
ῃ- /iː/as in χαμαιτύπῃ /kʰampaitýpiː/ "unto a whore"
ηυ- /iw/ as in ηὐρέθην /iwrétʰeːn/, and as /iwː/ before a vowel

θ - /tʰ/ as in ἄρθρα [ártʰr̊a] "joints, private parts"

ῑ - /iː/ as in φοινῑκίζω /pʰøːniːkízːoː/ "to eat pussy, to go down on"
ῐ- /i/ as in ἐγκολπίζω /eŋkolpízːoː/
"to take into one's bosom", "to insert into one's vagina, to fuck
oneself with" (with female subject), "to take it up the ass" (with male
subject)
ι - /j/ in borrowings as in Ἰανουάριος /jaːnuáːrios/ "January" from lat. iānuārius

κ - /k/as in πορνοβοσκέω /pornoboskéoː/ "to waste money on hookers"

λ - /l/ as in κόλπος /kólpos/ "lap, gulf, crotch"

μ - /m/ as in μείγνυμι /míːgnymi/ "to mingle, to have intercourse"

ν- /n/ as in νεῦρον /nêwron/ "tendon, penis".

ξ - /ks/ as in ξύλον /ksýlon/ "wood" (in both the literal and figurative sense)
ο - /o/ as in σκατός /skatós/ "shit"
ου -/uː/ normally as in ἀναισχυντογράφος /anaiskʰyntográpʰos/ "one who writes obscene words"; also /w/ in foreign borrowings as in οὐαλεριος /walérios/ from lat. "Valerius"
οι- /øː ~ øɥ/ as in ὀιφῶ /øːpʰôː/ "to fuck" ; /yi/ in borrowings when used to render the Latin "qui-" as in κοίντος /kyíntos/ "Quintus."

π - /p/ as in κατάπυγον /katápyːgon/ "the middle finger" (used as an obscene gesture. Related to καταπύγων /katapýːgoːn/ "buttboy")
ρ
- /r/ as in κασωρίς /kasoːrís/ "call-girl"; pronounced as a voiceless
[r̊] at the beginnings of words ῥ as the second element of a doubled
-ρρ- [rr̊], and when preceded by θ, χ or φ as in ἀφροδισιάζω
/apʰr̊odiːsiázːoː/ "to have sex with"

σ - /s/ normally
as in σαύρα /sáwra/ "lizard, a long penis"; voiced [z] before μ, ν, β
and δ as in the etymologically ironic λεσβιάζω /lezbiázːoː/ "to suck
dick."

ῡ- /y:/ as in πῡγίζω /pyːgízːoː/ "to sodomize"
ῠ- /y/ as in κύσθος /kýstʰos/ "cunt"
υι- /yi/ as in ἄγυιος /áːgyios/ "weak-limbed, unable to get it up"

φ
- /pʰ/ normally as in φλέβιππος [pʰlébippos] "horse-hung"; used to
represent the fricative [f] in borrowings as in φοσσᾶτον /fosːâːton/
"ditch, trench, twat" from lat. fossātum

χ - /kʰ/ as in αἰσχρουργέω [aiskʰr̊uːrgéoː] "to masturbate."

ψ
- /ps/ as in ψωλοκοπῶ /psoːlokopôː/ with male object, "to turn someone
turn on, to give someone a hardon." note also the middle voice,
ψωλοκοποῦμαι /psoːlokopûːmai/ "to get a boner." (This verb is often
found in brothel graffiti. I cannot possibly imagine why.)

ω - /oː/ as in λεωφόρος /leoːpʰóros/ "a woman who enjoys sex" (cause it was weird for women to like it too much)
ῳ - /oi/ as in ζῳον /zôion/ "animal, creature, penis"

Spiritus asper - /h/ as in ἵμερος /híːmeros/ "desire, passion," also "sex-drive, ability to get it up"

If
the choice of examples above appears unacceptably obscene to my more
decorous readers (assuming my blog hasn't already driven them far, far
away), I would advise them to consider what even Saint Paul, closeted heterosexual though he was, once said of the
squeamish in another context:

οἶδα καὶ πέπεισμαι ἐν κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ ὅτι οὐδὲν κοινὸν δι’ ἑαυτοῦ, εἰ μὴ τῷ λογιζομένῳ τι κοινὸν εἶναι ἐκείνῳ κοινόν. I know, and am convinced by our Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in and of itself. Rather, if someone believes it is
unclean, then for that person it is unclean.
-Romans [14:14]

The
phonological system I have briefly sketched above offers, in my
opinion, the best shot at authenticity inasmuch as this is possible for a
dead (or perhaps zombie) language.

First of all, the
phonology is (as the term "Hellenistic" suggest) implicitly
post-classical, and therefore allows one to read classical and most
hellenistic texts without fear of anachronism. Furthermore, the vowel
contrasts are somewhat less idiosyncratic in their
complexity than those of its 5th century Athenian progenitor, and are
probably easier to naturalize for a larger proportion of Greek-learners.

More importantly, and unlike mid-5th century Attic,
the Hellenistic option does not
necessarily give us the insoluble problem of needing to sound like a
native. It reflects an age when Greek was being widely
learned by non-natives and bilingualism was unusually common, (and where
class and gender distinctions in speech would have been nowhere near as
clear-cut as they could be in a stable, heavily stratified, monoglot
society such as that of classical Athens.) In the 3rd century BC, the
streets of Alexandria, Kos, Palmyra and Sepphoris were indubitably rife
with all
manner of bilinguals, non-native Hellenophones and Greek-learners, much
as Anglophone bilinguals, non-native Anglophones and English-learners
fill the streets of New York, London, Amsterdam or Manila today.

The
system I offer is, as far as I can determine, a reasonable
articulatory facsimile of the kind of Greek a well-to-do non-native in,
say, 225 B.C.
might have aspired to reproduce. That said, the student need not worry
too much (if they're obsessive enough to worry at all in the first place) about whatever
traces of foreignness may remain in his/her "Barbarian" accent, for in
such a context of widespread adult language acquisition in the target
timeframe there is little reason to consider this "inauthentic" in any
meaningful sense.

Koine
pronunciation was "common" in the most literal meaning of the word in
that
it seems to have had a somewhat stable, supraregional phonology
distinct from the divergent sound-changes operating in various regional
versions of Greek -both native and non-native- in the same period. An
extremely rough parallel might be drawn to the modern colloquial ad hoc Koine
of educated Arabs.. (One
might compare also the tendency of Anglophone Arabic-learners to
approximate this version of Arabic, at both the phonological and
morphological level, in conversing with Arabs.)

It
must be noted, however, that even Koine pronunciation could hardly have
been completely uniform anymore than that of any other lingua franca
(which is why I call this compromise pronunciation of mine a
"streamlined" version of Koinizing Hellenistic Greek.) I have based my
system on the learned Koine of Alexandria (where I actually happen to be as I type this), mainly because of
its prominence as an ancient cultural center, but also because the
papyrological and other data on Alexandria are (for sundry reasons) much
greater than elsewhere. There were regions and regional registers in
the late 3rd century where, for example οι was not realized as /øː/ or
/øɥ/ but might be anything from /yː/ (in Boeotia) to /øi/ (in Attica) to the original pronunciation of /oi/ among the most
educated Romans. Likewise, there must have those who, under the influence of
surviving non-Attic speech, pronounced the voiced stops β δ γ, and even
aspirated stops χ θ φ, as fricatives (just as in Modern Greek) although
their speech must have been regarded as substandard. This all allows a
reasonably wide latitude of possible pronunciations for the student
today.

Pitch-Accent, Vowel Quantity and Other Stuff

Speaking
of possible pronunciations, now is a good time to discuss the issue of
accent. 5th century Attic, as we have seen, was -at least on the surface- pitch-accented (we'll get to the qualification later.) The use
of a stress accent of the kind found in English, German or Russian, was
no more than a peculiarity of Thessalian. If the comedies of a certain
asshole named Aristophanes be any indication, foreigners who spoke with a
stress-accent could expect a rain of almighty piss and ridicule to pour
down on them.

There is good evidence, however, that in
Hellenistic times both the conservative pitch-accent (of the type heard
in Golden Age Athens) and a progressive stress-accent (of the type
heard in English or Modern Greek) could be widely encountered.

That different regions had different prosodic habits is likely not only because of the general tendency of speech communities to develop regional differences when a language is spread over so massive an area, but because there is a great deal of evidence that suggests not only the existence of such differences but even some of their distinguishing features. One of the most significant is different regional spelling habits which developed in e.g. inscriptions, non-literary papyri, graffiti and the like. If one compares the spellings found in Athenian vs. Egyptian writing of the same period, one finds a considerable amount of difference.

The
most widely-accepted explanation for the loss of vowel-quantity and
pitch-accent is that the former conditioned the latter. Geoffrey
Horrocks puts it thusly:

The
loss of long vowels and diphthongs destroyed the environment for the
occurrence of the circumflex accent (rise-fall on a single 'long'
syllable) and so neutralized the contrast between the circumflex and
acute (rise+fall over two successive syllables). This in turn
highlighted the increase in volume that was almost certainly associated
secondarily with the rise in pitch, a development aided regionally by
substrate effects (e.g. Egyptian/Coptic had a strong stress accent) and
one that led to the perception that increased amplitude rather than a
rise in pitch was the primary marker of word accent.

First, Horrocks' presumption that the contrast between circumflex and acute would have been neutralized by a loss of contrastive vowel-length has less truth to it than a pop star's autobiography. In languages which have a stress accent, particularly if they don't have phonological vowel-length, stress often manifests itself as not just greater intensity but also greater duration of the syllable's nucleus. I.e. accented vowels will tend to be not just louder but also longer than their unaccented counterparts (as in e.g. modern Greek.) This can even happen when there is phonological vowel length. (as in standard Serbo-croatian). When this is the case it is quite possible to have an intermediate system of
pitch-differentiated stress, (again as in Serbo-croatian) whereby a stress accent is combined with lexical contrast in the alignment of the accentual peak. i.e. the pitch can rise early or late in a stressed vowel. This could easily have remained a contrastive feature in Greek for accented syllables that were also historically long and could thus carry either an acute (manifesting itself as a rising pitch) or a circumflex (a fall in pitch). There is thus no reason why a neutralization of phonological vowel-length need prevent either phonetic
vowel length as one of the manifestations of stress or contrastive pitch contours on a stressed syllable. Indeed, the
evidence available suggests quite the opposite. In other words, the tonal contrast of minimal pairs such as φῶς "man" vs. φώς "light" could have easily survived both the stress-reenforcement of the accent and the loss of phonological vowel-length. In truth there is scant evidence that what
Horrocks describes really happened. What is far more likely is that a
stress accent arose before the general loss of quantity distinctions. This
resulted in the accented syllable attracting additional accentual
exponents, namely increased duration. The quantitative pattern was in
conflict with the tendency to lengthen stress-reinforced accented
syllables and shorten unaccented ones, and therefore eroded.

The widespread idea that vowel-length was lost first seems to be the unfortunate result of research conducted by classicists and papyrologists based
upon flawed
assumptions. The method of investigation has
usually been to compare misspellings of etymologically long vs. short
vowels found in inscriptions and papyri with no regard for accentuation,
on the rather questionable assumption of equal accentuation for long
and short vowels. But in fact, graffiti, papyri and inscriptions show
that even in the first century or so of the Christian era, an
etymologically short vowel was far more likely to be confused with an
etymologically long vowel when accented and that speakers still had an intuition of length being a distinctive feature in unaccented syllables. This suggests that vowel-length had yet to be completely neutralized and was accessible to
speakers who equated accent-lengthened, but etymologically short, vowels with
historically long vowels elsewhere. Moreover, even this by itself doesn't even necessarily mean that pitch ceased to be the main accentual feature. All it definitely suggests is that by this time the pitch accent had come to be reenforced by duration. Modern greek, however, shows articulatory intensity as an exponent of accent as well, and also it seems clear that intensity had jumped onto the accentual bandwagon in most areas at least by the end of the 2nd century AD.

Thus, where the old pitch-accent had become a stress-accent, the quantitative distinctions of vowel-length were not immediately obliterated. Contrary to what some people who faint at the sight of data suggest, it is,
in fact, possible for a language to have a contrastive stress-accent
and contrastive vowel length at the same time. An example is Hebron
Arabic
where not only does the initial stress of شفنا /ˈʃufnaː/ "we saw"
contrast with the final stress of شفناه /ʃufˈnaː/ "we saw him" but the
long /aː/ of حاضر /'ħa:ḍar/ "he harangued, he lectured" contrasts with
the short /a/ of حضر /'ħaḍar/ "he showed up". Other languages that allow contrastive stress to coexist with contrastive vowel-length include Estonian, Komi and some versions of Australian English ( e.g. Australian [bɪd] "bid" vs. [bɪːd] "beard".) W.S.
Allen, whom I hate to love, recommends against attempting a
reconstruction of the ancient pitch accent in practice, on the following
basis:

We
probably have sufficient knowledge to achieve a rough approximation to
the melodic pattern of isolated Greek words...but...we know virtually
nothing about 'melodic syntax' i.e. the way in which such patterns
interacted with one another and with clause- and sentence-intonations in
continuous speech. To judge from what we find in living tonal and
melodically accented languages, these interactions may be extensive and
complex. Given the melodic patterns of the word-isolates in such
languages, it is of course possible to derive the melodic
sentence-pattern from them- but the latter is not usually a simple
summation of the former. The author has listened to a number of
recordings, recent and less recent, of attempted melodic-accentual
recitations of ancient Greek, and, whilst some are less objectionable or
ridiculous than others, has found none of them convincing; and, as W.G.
Clark commented on such efforts over a century ago, the less gifted
exponents of this practice 'may fancy that they reproduce it when they
do nothing of the kind'. The carefully considered advice is therefore
given, albeit reluctantly, not to strive for a melodic rendering but
rather to concentrate one's efforts on fluency and accuracy in other
aspects of the language

Allen's
advice was sound when he gave it several decades ago. It probably still
is, and it has at least some basis in antiquity. In using a
stress-accent with hellenistic pronunciation, one is at least producing
the kind of Greek which, in addition to being widespread across the social spectrum in many areas, was certainly current among many a non-native of the 3rd
century B.C.

For those who wish to use a pitch accent,
however, and have some background in phonetics and phonology, Devine and
Stephens' book The Prosody of Greek Speech is full of useful
data employing linguistic universals, inscriptional evidence, metrical
particularities and surviving fragments of ancient musical settings. That
said, the book is mercilessly technical and a lot of it makes for
pretty dry reading.

But here are some general pointers:

Acute accent: raised (high) pitch on short vowels, rising (low to high) pitch on long vowels. In both cases the pitch of the following syllable is significantly lowered below the onset pitch of the accented syllable.

Grave: a more modestly raised pitch on short vowels.

Circumflex: falling pitch from high to low

Greek
intonation exhibits "tone-terracing"- a tendency for pitch-contours to
be constrained to smaller and smaller intervals as a phrase progresses.
In unmarked utterance (i.e. without especial emphasis applied to any one
word or word-like group) the highest pitch of a major syntactic phrase
is usually the pitch-bearing syllable of the first lexical word. The
pitch-intervals of the remaining tone contours decrease progressively,
resetting slightly for the beginnings of minor phrases.

ADDENDUM ON PEDAGOGY:

The practical difficulties of actually teaching this pronunciation, even with stress accent, are now apparent to me. There seems to be no way around the fact that contrasts such as /pʰ kʰ tʰ/ vs /p k t/ are difficult to produce, and even more difficult to perceive reliably, for most Euroglots. There is some pedagogical justification for the common practice of pronouncing φ, χ, θ as /f x θ/.

3 comments:

Great post! The dialog demonstrating the Attic dialect really whetted my appetite for more. Would you consider adding an update with minimal pairs, such as the one you mentioned with φῶς "man" and φώς "light"? Or the famous one of Hegelochus, where he said γαλῆν ὁρῶ "I see a weasel" instead of γαλήν' ὁρῶ "I see a calm".

I have a feeling that the prosody familiar to a speaker of English would easily serve to render the pitch accent of Attic Greek, but I have trouble doing so; I end up chanting the words instead of saying them.

Very interesting stuff!I was wondering what your source is for this statement: "Thessalian, for example, was probably stress-accented and stress-timed in contrast to the rest of the Hellenosphere which at the time had moraic timing and a pitch-accent." How do we know this?

I think this is the first time I've seen anyone point out that a syllable can be emphasised by being lengthened as well as by pitch or amplitude. Since western music at least notates length and pitch very exactly but is rather vague about loudness, is it surprising that languages whose 'stress' system is based on length and/or pitch rather than loudness are commonly described as 'musical'?

My knowledge of Greek is to say the least elementary, although I did read Allen's book and another similar one a good many years ago. I have however spent time attempting to understand the structure of Middle Cornish verse (most of the surviving texts are verse dramas) which I believe worked on a length-pitch system similar to some forms of Modern Welsh, rather than a stress accent like English. (There is no close analogy with Greek because phonemic vowel length had disappeared much earlier, all the original British long vowels had merged into either /i:/ or /a:/ with the latter being raised, rounded and centralised. The only remaining length contrast /i(:)/ would almost certainly have been phonetically [ i: ~ ɪ ] and was re-analysed as a quality distinction, i.e. / i ~ ɪ /. Phonetic vowel-length was then allophonic, controlled by 'stress' and syllable structure.) In most polysyllable the penult ('stressed') syllable was lengthened where possible, while a pitch element fell on the final vowel or the second element of some diphthongs and controlled the rhyme scheme. None of which will interest you in the least, but anyway ...

In order to get a feel for this system, I learnt extensive passages by heart and then experimented with variations of phrasing etc. In the process I discovered a number of hidden rhymes, near-rhymes, assonances etc. that were not apparent from simply staring at the text. (It was also immediately apparent when a line had been miscopied etc.) Through this process I was able to produce a plausible reconstruction of how the texts may have sounded. I can't be sure if it's accurate, but at least it works and brings the texts 'alive' as poetry, rather than the way they are usually read, as rather tortured prose.

So, try this with some extended samples of good Greek verse. Learn the words well, then experiment saying them this way and that and if you're lucky a solution may simply 'fall out' and strike you as 'just right'. After all human speech organs and perceptions haven't changed over the centuries, although of course cultural bias is always a problem. It may well be that some of the descriptions given by the ancients will suddenly make more sense etc.

Just my 10c, good luck!

Btw. /bɪd ~ bɪ:d/ is not confined to Australia. It is found at least in some English East-Midland dialects, where RP /iə, eə, oə/ are realised more or less as /ɪ: ɛ: ɔ:/.

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